A novelist's interest in objectophilia.
The first known case was in 1979. Eija-Riitta had seen the Berlin Wall on television at the age of seven and, struck by its long, parallel lines, fell in love. She tied the knot on their sixth visit together, marrying the Berlin Wall and taking it as her last name—Berliner-Mauer. She regarded the tearing down of the wall as a catastrophe and slept with a 1:20 scale model until her death in 2015.
In 2018, Akihiko Kondo spent two million yen to marry animated pop-idol Hatsune Miku. Miku, a “vocaloid,” was developed in 2007 by Crypton Future Media. She serves as a mascot for a voicebank software, in which users can compose their own songs for the virtual character to sing and dance to. Miku stands 158 cm tall, sports teal pigtails, and has a suggested vocal range of A3–E5, B2–B3. She has appeared as a hologram at concerts, and as a doll at Kondo’s wedding. None of his family attended the ceremony.
These individuals are classified as
objectophiliacs. Read: those who hold sexual or romantic attraction towards inanimate objects. It goes without saying, of course, that objectophiliacs are often the target of derision, mockery. But I’d like to expand on objectophilia a little bit, on that idea of love as well. Perhaps even argue that, ridiculous though they may seem, these cases are just the natural conclusion to the relationships the rest of us already hold.
My debut novel,
Satellite Love, concerns itself with one such objectophile: Anna Obata, a 16-year-old girl in southern Japan who falls in love with a satellite. Like most writers, I imagine, the concept came to me before any notions of theme. Other than vague ideas of melancholy and escape, I didn’t understand exactly
why Anna would fall for a satellite, nor the ultimate conclusions that would come from it. So it was that, through writing, I found myself drawn into the psychology of objectophiliacs. ...
https://lithub.com/objectophilia-on-the-people-who-fall-in-love-with-inanimate-things/